been thrown up to house the influx of workers from cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh. But the workers had brought their love of strikes north with them and gradually the following generations had preferred to live on the dole and not even pretend to work. Factories had closed down and the winds of Sutherland whipped through their shattered windows and fireweed grew in vacant lots. It was like one of those science-fiction movies about the twenty-first century where anarchy rules and gangs roam the streets. The last industry to go was the fishing industry, killed off by the European Union with its stringent fishing quotas and restrictions which only the British seemed to obey, and local lethargy. And then there were drugs. Drugs had crept north up the snaking new motorways which cut through the mountains: drugs like a plague, drugs causing crime; drugs breeding new white-faced malnourished children, AIDS from dirty shared needles, and death.
His jaw was beginning to ache from the punishment it had received at the dentist. He suddenly wished he had begged Mrs. Gilchrist not to mention his visit to the Inverness police, for if Blair heard about it, he would treat it as a case of insubordination.
Hamish entered the gloomy building where the smells of food from the police canteen always seemed to permeate the stale air.
He opened the door of the CID room and peered through the haze of cigarette smoke. Jimmy Anderson was alone, puffing at a cigarette, sitting with his feet up on his desk.
“Oh, Hamish, man, you are in deep shite,” he hailed him.
“Where’s Blair?”
“Still interviewing Maggie Bane, suspect number one.”
Hamish sat down opposite him. “Can I borrow this computer? I’d best start on my report.”
“Help yourself. Where were you?”
“I was around Braikie, asking questions, and then went back to Lochdubh to change into my uniform,” said Hamish, switching on the computer and then beginning to type his report of finding the body of Gilchrist.
“It looks as if you were right about one thing,” said Jimmy laconically. “They guess there was poison in his morning coffee, he writhed and vomited, and fell on the floor. There were vomit stains on the back of his coat as if he had rolled in his ain sick. Someone cleaned him up as best they could, hoisted him into that chair, drilled his teeth, then cold-bloodedly washed the floor. There were traces of vomit in the cracks in the linoleum.”
Hamish paused, his fingers hovering over the keys. “Why would anyone go to all that trouble?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, anyone with half a brain would have known we would have found the drilled teeth and the residue of vomit on the floor.”
“Maybe the murderer was filled with blind hatred. Maybe he was so mad with rage, he didn’t care whether he was interrupted or not.”
Hamish shook his head.
“It took a steady hand to drill one neat hole in each o’ his teeth. Anyone in a mad rage would have smashed all his teeth and then smashed the surgery.”
“Could be. But the strength that it all took! That lets Maggie Bane out, I think.”
“Unless,” said Hamish, “she had an accomplice.”
? Death of a Dentist ?
3
Bold and erect the Caledonian stood, Old was his mutton and his claret good; Let him drink port, the English statesman cried – He drank the poison and his spirit died.
—
Hamish typed away busily at his report. He remembered the day when computers were a deep and dark mystery to him. Now it was easier than a typewriter.
The door crashed open and Blair lumbered in. He loomed over Hamish. “Where were you?”
“I was interviewing townspeople,” said Hamish, “and then I went to change into my uniform before reporting here.” The printer rattled out the final page of his report. He bundled the pages together and handed them to Blair. “There’s my report.”
Blair took it and stood glaring. “Get to your feet, man, when a senior officer addresses you.”
Hamish obediently stood up.
Blair suddenly sighed and slumped down in a chair. “Oh, sit down, Macbeth,” he grumbled, “and stop standing there looking as useless as you are.”
Hamish sat down again. Jimmy sniggered.
“Where’s Maggie Bane?” asked Hamish.
“Had to send her home,” replied Blair with a surly scowl. “I’ll swear that lassie had something to dae with it, but she sticks to her story.”
“She said she was out shopping,” said Hamish, “but she had no bags of shopping with her when she returned to the surgery.”
“Oh, she had an explanation for that one. Says she went home and left the stuff there. We checked at the shops she said she went to and it all matches up. She went to the grocers and bought stuff, paid the rental on her telly, borrowed two videos from the video library and changed her books at the public library. It all checks out.”
“But why this morning?” asked Hamish. “Did she usually take an hour off?”
“She sticks to her story that it was a quiet morning and she took advantage of it. She said she asked Gilchrist’s permission and he said it was all right. Och, the number of people that need tae be interviewed. We’ve got tae see all his patients. Thon Mrs. Harrison wasn’t at home earlier. You can make yourself useful and drop in on her and get a statement, and get one from that fisherman, Archie Macleod.”
“I thought the CID took statements in a murder enquiry,” said Hamish.
This was indeed the case, but Blair, despite his insults, secretly valued the lanky Highland policeman’s intelligence. All Blair’s wits were usually put to using Hamish and at the same time making it look as if any flashes of insight were his own.
“Was Gilchrist in debt, by any chance?” Hamish asked when Blair’s answer to his previous question had only been a belch.
“He wisnae robbed,” howled Blair, his accent thickening as he grew more truculent. “Why d’ye ask?”
“Just an idea,” said Hamish, heading for the door.
Night was falling on unlovely Strathbane as he left police headquarters. The orange sodium lights were staining the Highland sky where dirty seagulls who never seemed to sleep wheeled and screeched.
As he pulled up at a red light, a pinched-faced youth staggered and then gave the police Land Rover a vicious kick.
The light turned green and Hamish drove on, reflecting that if he arrested every yob in Strathbane who kicked a police car or spat on it it would mean he’d never have time for anything else.
The erratic wind of Sutherland had died. Frost was already beginning to sparkle on the road ahead. When he got to Lochdubh he drove straight through it and out onto the Braikie road where Mrs. Harrison lived. She would certainly have heard of the murder by now. The Highland tom-toms would have been beating from Sutherland to Caithness, to Inverness-shire and Ross and Cromarty.
He drew up outside a small, low croft house. There was a light shining from the window and a battered old Vauxhall parked outside. It looked as if Mrs. Harrison was at home. He hesitated, his hand on the gate. With Mrs. Harrison’s reputation, they should have sent a woman.
But he shrugged and marched up to the low door and rang the doorbell. The door opened suddenly and a small woman looked up at him. Her hair was dyed black, that dead lifeless black, and her wrinkled skin was yellowish. Her dark eyes somewhere between black and brown glittered out over heavy pouches. Her thin, old, disappointed mouth was permanently turned down at the corners. She was wearing a dress which looked as if she had bought it from Mrs. Edwardson, and over it, a Fair Isle cardigan.
“It’s the police, is it? It’s about time you got here,” she said. “Why aren’t you in plain clothes?”
